“You’re no good to me yet,” Monkley told her. “You’re too old to be really innocent and not old enough to pretend to be. Besides, people don’t take school-girls to race meetings. Later on, when you’ve learned a bit more about life, we’ll start a gambling club in the West End and work on a swell scale what I do now in a small way in railway-carriages.”
This scheme of Jimmy’s became a favorite topic; and Sylvia began to regard a flash gambling-hell as the crown of human ambition. Jimmy’s imagination used to run riot amid the splendor of it all, as he discoursed of the footmen with plush breeches; of the shaded lamps; of the sideboard loaded with hams and jellies and fruit at which the guests would always be able to refresh themselves, for it would never do to let them go away because they were hungry, and people were always hungry at three in the morning; of the smart page-boy in the entrance of the flats who would know how to reckon up a visitor and give the tip up-stairs by ringing a bell; and of the rigid exclusion of all women except Sylvia herself.
“I can see it all before me,” Jimmy used to sigh. “I can smell the cigars and whisky. I’m flinging back the curtains when every one has gone and feeling the morning air. And here we are stuck in this old cucumber-frame at Hampstead! But we’ll get it, we’ll get it. I shall have a scoop one of these days and be able to start saving, and when I’ve saved a couple of hundred I’ll bluff the rest.”
In October Jimmy came home from Newmarket and told Sylvia he had run against an old friend, who had proposed a money-making scheme which would take him away from London for a couple of months. He could not explain the details to Sylvia, but he might say that it was a confidence trick on the grand scale and that it meant his residing in a northern city. He had told his friend he would give him an answer to-morrow, and wanted to know what Sylvia thought about it.
She was surprised by Jimmy’s consulting her in this way. She had always taken it for granted that from time to time she would be left alone. Jimmy’s action made her realize more clearly than ever that to a great extent she already possessed that liberty of choice the prospect of which had dawned upon her at Swanage.
She assured Jimmy of her readiness to be left alone in Hampstead. When he expatiated on his consideration for her welfare she was bored and longed for him to be gone; his solicitude gave her a feeling of restraint; she became impatient of his continually wanting to know if she should miss him and of his commendation of her to the care of Mr. and Mrs. Gustard, from whom she desired no interference, being quite content with the prospect of sitting in her window with a book and a green view.
The next morning Monkley left Hampstead; and Sylvia inhaled freedom with the autumn air. She had been given what seemed a very large sum of money to sustain herself until Jimmy’s return. She had bought a new hat; a black kitten had adopted her; it was pearly October weather. Sylvia surveyed life with a sense of pleasure that was nevertheless most unreasonably marred by a faint breath of restlessness, an almost imperceptible discontent. Life had always offered itself to her contemplation, whether of the past or of the future, as a set of vivid impressions that formed a crudely colored panorama of action without any emotional light and shade, the intervals between which, like the intervals of a theatrical performance, were only tolerable with plenty of chocolates to eat. At the present moment she had plenty of chocolates to eat, more, in fact, than she had ever had before, but the interval was seeming most exasperatingly long.
“You ought to take a walk on the Heath,” Mr. Gustard advised. “It isn’t good to sit about all day doing nothing.”
“You don’t take walks,” Sylvia pointed out. “And you sit about all day doing nothing. I do read a book, anyway.”
“I’m different,” Mr. Gustard pronounced, very solemnly. “I’ve lived my life. If I was to take a walk round Hampstead I couldn’t hardly peep into a garden without seeing a tree as I’d planted myself. And when I’m gone, the trees ’ll still be there. That’s something to think about, that is. There was a clergyman came nosing round here the other day to ask me why I didn’t go to church. I told him I’d done without church as a lad, and I couldn’t see why I shouldn’t do without it now. ‘But you’re growing old, Mr. Gustard,’ he says to me. ‘That’s just it,’ I says to him. ‘I’m getting very near the time when, if all they say is true, I shall be in the heavenly choir for ever and ever, amen, and the less singing I hear for the rest of my time on earth the better.’ ‘That’s a very blasphemous remark,’ he says to me. ‘Is it?’ says I to him. ‘Well, here’s another. Perhaps all this talk by parsons,’ I says, ‘about this life on earth being just a choir practice for heaven won’t bear looking into. Perhaps we shall all die and go to sleep and never wake up and never dream and never do nothing at all, never. And if that’s true,’ I says, ‘I reckon I shall bust my coffin with laughing when I think of my trees growing and growing and growing and you preaching to a lot of old women and children about something you don’t know nothing about and they don’t know nothing about and nobody don’t know nothing about.’ With that I offered him a pear, and he walked off very offended with his head in the air. You get out and about, my dear. Bustle around and enjoy yourself. That’s my motto for the young.”